GOING TO POT OVER POT

More and more I am coming to believe that Canadian attitudes and laws
concerning marijuana are hopelessly illogical.

It seems that governments major and minor in Canada and the weight of
the nation's law enforcement are frittering away colossal amounts of
money, time and effort for zero progress.

It's like the weather; everyone talks about it but no one does
anything about it.

It used to be that we fretted about the use of marijuana, the horrible
damage it was going to do to our kids' brains.

That didn't jibe with the happy, serene disposition of all those kids
on Fourth Avenue, but never mind.

Now it isn't so much the use of pot that is the near-hysterical
concern, it's the growing of it.

I blame the whole Canadian media for suggesting that a marijuana grow
op, 28 plants in a rural barn, was the root cause of the murder of
four RCMP in rural Alberta. The RCMP had gone to the farm to check out
reports of stolen cars. The discovery of the pot plants was incidental.

And by no stretch of credulity could the killer be called a hardened
grow operator. He was a sociopath, a psychopath, eaten up with a
raging hatred of authority. He was a freak.

The Justice Ministry and the RCMP, perhaps to divert scrutiny of
police procedures, have fallen in with the hysterical, angle-crazy
media in the absurd rationale that there was pot on the scene, ergo
pot was complicit in the killings.

The most reasonable explanation for the murders that I have read is
almost a fairy tale version. A member of the federal Justice
Department said, "We just have to accept that meteors fall out of the
sky sometimes and someone's going to get hurt."

I don't think it is too far-fetched to think of pot growers as farmers
with a reliable crop, no blights, droughts, ruinous hailstorms. Or
perhaps they are bootleggers, selling home-brew.

The more law is enforced to wipe out the grow-ops, the more the price
and profits grow. It is a situation where a weed fetches the price of
white asparagus.

The demand is too great to be discouraged by law. The only rational
response must be to decriminalize it. Let anyone who wants it, grow
and smoke it openly.

Perhaps with the market opened, there will be less crime to control.
The huge waste of police time could be diverted to a really serious
crime issue, juvenile street racing and hit-and-run killings.

Better yet, Ottawa would be removed from an enterprise that is no more
wicked than selling tomatoes from a roadside stall.